Beside me, there were two other panelists, Ron Bernstein, a savvy and powerful senior agent at ICM and Barbara Schiffman, a much admired and experienced script consultant. I was chosen, I suppose, because I had either sold or optioned a dozen of my books to Hollywood producers and studios.

There were about 150 people in the audience. Most, because of proximity, had some knowledge of the film and entertainment business. Many, as I later learned, had self-published memoirs and books on various subjects as well as fiction. Some had books published by traditional publishers.

All were anxious to know how their offering could be adapted to a movie, which for them, was the gold standard of literary achievement, the holy grail of their efforts. I am talking primarily about big screen movies, those shown in popcorn palaces, touted by big ads and endless promos, the movies that make people famous.

Bernstein, who is on the daily firing line of selling books to the flicks, opined that many movies today were designed for a very young demographic and were made to sell ancillaries like toys and video games. There were, he noted, adult movies being made but fewer than in the past. He did acknowledge that many movies headed straight to cable television or DVDs and streaming sites.

Schiffman, an acknowledged expert on the technique of film stories was what one might characterize as a strict constructionist. She knew how stories could best be told on film, but admitted that it was impossible to predict marketability in advance in a constantly changing environment.

In my talk, I recounted the difficulties, complications and disappointments of getting a book adapted to a movie and the long odds that followed an option or even an outright sale of finally getting the book to the silver screen. I attributed my own experience to pure luck since I have never written a book with a movie in mind and my talk centered around my “war” stories of dealing with the clashing opinions and egos of the Hollywood creative and business community.

I cited the nightmare of the so-called collegial experience, of having to confront not only producers, directors, actors, their spouses or significant others, all of whom had their own views about how the movie should proceed. For a novelist, used to being king of his mind-made mountain, the process is terrifying.

One can easily understand why Ernest Hemingway said something to the effect that the best way for an author to handle Hollywood was to stand at the Nevada border, throw the book over the fence to California, have them throw the money back, then run like hell.

What astonished me in the question period at the event and the aftermath, was that many of these self-published authors were absolutely certain that their books were big movie material.

Some were convinced that the public needed their take on this or that cause, and that their book “deserved” a movie. People lined up to flack their books on such subjects as life in New Caledonia, Autism, social justice and other areas designed to “inspire” movie goers and help save the world. It was futile to cite movies as mere entertainment.

A number of people flashed their self-published book covers, which featured entertainers long gone written by middle to old age offspring convinced that the world was waiting for their filmed resurrection.

Some bold people thrust manuscripts at Bernstein who very politely and with great tact, refused them. I made the mistake of dismissing one eager questioner with “But who would come to your movie?” which he took as an insult.

If there was a takeaway from this experience it was that there is a giant groundswell of traditionally published and self-published wannabe recognized writers out there who really believe that their work deserves not only to be read and lauded, but adapted to big Hollywood films. They fantasize that they have created works that demand attention in this media. Indeed, many have been bolstered by relatives and close friends out of genuine love or ingratiation and lavish encouragement that their work is a surefire movie.

In that room I saw first hand what it meant to these people to believe absolutely in their work, most of which probably passed through countless rejections before ending up as a self-published book. These were, indeed, true believers. They were not to be dissuaded.

That said, I continue to admire their pluck and self-confidence. It is really, really hard to write a book. Whether it be fiction or non-fiction the investment in time is enormous. If not self-confidence and commitment, what can sustain a determined writer to spend long hours alone spurred on by the absolute belief that their work is worth doing despite rejection after rejection?

Suddenly digitization and the e-book phenomenon has opened the doors wide to their creative efforts and the old stigma of vanity publishing has disappeared, giving them confidence that they could compete with writers and publishers everywhere on the planet.

One can forgive them for being convinced that their effort is well worth the candle. They have to embrace the idea that after such a massive effort it surely is a psychic thrill for them to hold a book in their hands with their name emblazoned on the cover, or see their work in digital form on a reading device. They must believe that they have not only enriched themselves but the world at large, and yearn for others to lionize and praise them.

In a society where people without achievement or portfolio are publicized as public heroes and given dubious celebrity status, surely a long form book writer deserves some sort of honors, at the very least, for his or her heroic effort to create a book.

In a profound way, seeing their work adapted to the silver screen in an auditorium filled with rapt attentive people concentrating on their ideas, characters and conception can offer the thrill of a lifetime.  I’ve experienced it and know its power.

Fortunately, the future for the committed writer who believes that his or her work demands a visual moving picture component is not all that bleak. A sister technology to the digitization that made his or her self-published work possible is also available to adapt the work to moving images.  It may not offer the Hollywood treatment, complete with massive advertising and distribution treatment, but it is quite possible to create a respectable product available through various outlets on the Net in a similar way as a self-published book.

The process is bound to get easier and cheaper as it matures, and I predict many will avail themselves of the opportunity as time goes on and more and more Net producers and writers seize the opportunity, producing documentaries or fiction stories on their own. There are also rumbles that the future of the standalone theater auditorium is doomed as more and more people shift to the technologically enhanced and economical home experience.

Marketing and distribution opportunities may be severely limited but there is, as it is with a book, a great psychic satisfaction for a creator to see his or her work adapted to a “film.” Granted its audience will be severely limited as it competes for recognition in a vast sea of other productions, but it may, however long the odds, offer a way into the more lucrative world of the big movie.

Of one thing I am certain. Technology has unleashed ever-expanding opportunities for the creative mind. It is surging and unstoppable.

In the culture of imaginative fiction, the concept of the heroic figure was being “genderized” and the notion of the female cop, soldier, firefighter, construction worker and other jobs once considered male turf was swiftly disappearing.

Although I had never tackled the mystery genre which was growing in popularity, my agent persuaded me to take the plunge and since I lived in the metropolitan Washington area, I decided to use the police department that covered the nation’s capitol as my venue. In casting around for a knowledgeable female who could give me some insight into the inner workings of the department and her own psyche I was lucky to find an experienced female homicide detective, Judy Roberts, who led me deep into the entrails of the mindset and procedure of police work as seen through the female perspective.

Thus was born Fiona FitzGerald, a brilliant young white woman, working with the largely black dominated police force. Because I was familiar with the political and social circles of the power elite in Washington, I conceived the idea of Fiona working only on those cases that involved that segment of the Washington upper crust.

The first book in the series “American Quartet,” dealt with a failed politician whose twisted mind conceived of the idea of staging a replication of the assassinations of our four American Presidents. It was cited for that year by the New York Times as being one of the most outstanding mystery books of that year. The series was born, although the background of Fiona was to undergo a profound change after the second book “American Sextet” was published.

In the first two books, Fiona’s father was a New York cop and she had grown up in that city. As with all of my books, the movie people beckoned and I found myself discussing film projects with a number of producers. One of them suggested to me that instead of making Fiona, the daughter of New York cops, it might be more interesting to make her the daughter of a prominent Senator who had grown up in Washington.

The idea appealed to me for many reasons and I made the change, immersing her in a culture that I knew a great deal about. She was now ensconced in the heady precincts of elite Washington with many contacts in that world, social, political and media and allow me the opportunity to expand on all the possibilities inherent in that milieu.

In the five books that followed, she was assigned to investigate murders that related to the power elite. It was a world I knew well. Readers addicted to the series would unfortunately be confused by the sudden change of background but I took the plunge and got few complaints.

A new publisher, founded by an experienced former executive of a major publishing company, decided to take on the series and I consented to move Fiona to his new company. This gave me the opportunity to fix Fiona’s background in the first two books and make her uniformly the daughter of a Senator. I rewrote parts of the first two books to fix this situation and saw in this new publisher a chance for Fiona to go on indefinitely solving murders among the players in the power structure.

Alas, it was not to be. The new publisher went bankrupt before he could launch the full series and I was forced to continue with the original publisher. Thus, in the first two books, Fiona remains the daughter of a New York cop, although in the subsequent books she had been transformed into her new incarnation.

Nevertheless, the movie and TV people continue to pursue the idea of starring Fiona. Two film companies have optioned the Fiona books. NBC has optioned the material twice, once for movie of the week and once for a series. Scripts have been commissioned, including one by yours truly and another prominent television writer, but, so far, she hasn’t found her television or movie legs.  Nevertheless the books continue to be in play and there is some optimism that Fiona will once again be on her way to movie or television stardom.

In the meantime there are always the seven books and she has a growing fan club.

I have a huge collection of books. In the three or four major moves in my lifetime I have culled, boxed, given away and donated thousands of books.  During each nesting experience, however, I have acquired yet more books and have repeated the culling process each time. I could never pass a bookstore without buying one or more books.

The fact is that I am probably a bibliophile in my soul. I love books. Reading books takes up much of my time, when I am not writing books. For years I have collected sets of leather bound books by favorite authors. It is a valuable collection. I have leather bound books by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hardy, O’Henry, Balzac, Henry James, Turgenev, Twain, de Maupassant, and on and on. To list them all would make this essay endless.

I also have duplicate copies of my own books in every language in which they have been translated and published. They amount to hundreds of copies. I will never part with them. They are as much a part of me as my DNA.

I love reading novels, older novels and contemporary novels. My tastes are eclectic. I have many non-fiction books as well, on politics, history and religion with particular emphasis on American history, which is yet another passion.

Now here is the kicker.

I am a pioneer in electronic publishing. All of my books have been reversed from major publishers and been digitized since the late nineties. I have for years been touting the inevitable switch from print to digital. It was a no brainer bound to happen. And it has reached the tipping point.

I made the first pitch for digital books on handheld reading devices at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show for the SONY reader when it was introduced in 2007. I bought one of the first Kindles and for kicks have been collecting other reading devices like the iPad and the Nook.

For years I have been addressing groups on the joys of reading content on screens. At first my reception had been hostile. I have listened to same complaints ad infinitum. They all have the same ring. I love the tactile feel of a book. I love the smell of ink and paper. I love to hold them. Books are my friends. I like to see them on my shelves. A curse on screen-read books.

My response is always the same. I feel your pain. I cite other examples of lost items, both corporal and emotional: The clip clop sound of a horse’s hooves on city streets, the beauty of horse drawn vehicles, the smell and sounds of sizzling logs in fireplaces, the fading art of writing letters, the lost joys of childhood, the reassuring scratches made by pen points dipped in inkwells, my mother’s cooking, the reassuring house calls of the family doctor, the old New York Herald Tribune, penny candy, knickers, saddle shoes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. It didn’t bring tears to the eyes of my audience and did not soften the blows to my advocacy of digital books.

I would explain to those early listeners and those I speak to today that there is a lot to say for the psychic joys of a physical book, but, in the end, there is one hard truth that is inescapable. The heart of a book is its content. Content trumps all. When all is said and done reading is a one on one communication system, an author’s presentation of his or her insights, stories, opinions, a distillation of his or her thoughts, instructive, inspirational, original, and, in its own way, a miracle of transference through words. I suppose one can find numerous other definitions, both literary and instructive. Content and its dissemination is the beating heart of civilization. Enough said. I’m sure the point is made.

In one tiny device, Kindle, Nook, iPad et al, I can fit the content of every book on my shelves and can, if I chose, soon be able to download at my whim the content of my choice  among most books ever published since the discovery that content can be portable.

That said, it does not diminish my love of physical books as objects of admiration and devotion.

But here I am culling once again. I find I am being more ruthless than ever with less second thoughts or pangs of conscience on what to keep and what to discard. I no longer really want to shelve paperbacks and am making my culling judgments on the basis of my emotional attachments, my love of the content presented by those authors who have truly moved me, whose content has given me hours of pleasure and made a difference in my understanding of the human condition.

I will keep those books in my new apartment as a monument to my love of books and my favorite authors as well as a symbol of enduring friendship.

Oh yes, one more thought. While I can enjoy the sight of seeing many of my “friends” tucked comfortably on my bookshelves, I can now carry these “friends” everywhere I go and in both a physical and symbolic sense hold them close to my heart.

In that time this cautionary tale about the perils of divorce and the destructive power of materialism which burst upon the public consciousness, has not only become part of the world-wide zeitgeist, but it has morphed into the nomenclature of divorce, both as a legal description and a symbolic description of a marriage breakup’s ultimate consequences.

Ironically, the peak statistic for divorces in the United States was the same year that the book was published, 1981. In that year the divorce rate in the United States had soared to 5.6 divorces per 1000 marriages. In 2005 the rate was 3.6 and continues to drop, a situation that is mirrored throughout the world. Astonishingly, The War of the Roses, continues to garner traction in terms of name recognition in every corner of the globe.

It would, of course, be false modesty to suggest that this cautionary tale about divorce contributed to the impetus for this declining divorce rate. But one most note the impact of the publication of this novel which germinated a movie, a play and a sequel novel is still bouncing higher and higher in the public consciousness. Perhaps it is part of something bigger, but facts are facts, the divorce rate, for whatever reason, is in decline.

I am astonished at the staying power of the idea embedded in this book which takes a dark view on divorce and what the process itself does to people. Wherever I have traveled in the world, people who identify me as the author of the novel are convinced that it is autobiographical. Even when I explain that I have been married only once to the same girl I fell in love with a half century ago, they will insist that this cannot be true.

I have received countless comments, letters and e-mails from people who have read the book or seen the movie. Many have expressed their thanks to me for changing their lives in some way, which is the most gratifying comment to be received by an author. Some have confessed that they had abandoned any idea of fighting over property in the course of their divorces. Best of all, some have told me that it caused their reconciliation.

The idea for The War of the Roses came to me at a dinner party in Washington in 1979. One of our female friends was dating a lawyer, who was her guest at the party. At some point, he looked at his watch and announced that he had to get home or his wife would lock him out of the house. When asked why, he said he was in the process of getting a divorce and was living under the same roof and sharing facilities and that part of the agreement was a strict set of rules on coming and goings and the division of living quarters.

It is always difficult to describe to people, how a story idea enters a novelist’s consciousness. By the time I began to write The War of the Roses I had already published nine novels and my antenna must have been circulating feverishly searching for a new idea. The dilemma expressed by this dinner guest might be called the “eureka” moment.

The story quickly formed in my mind and, with the exception of a brief conversation with a Judge who was an expert in domestic law, I did no other legal research on the subject of divorce. Oddly, many people have become convinced, including that dinner guest that somehow I had burrowed into the legal files of their various divorce actions and I cannot tell you how many times over the years people have accused me of “stealing their divorces.” I tried countering this accusation by explaining that a novel’s story grows out of a novelist’s imagination and the amalgamation of his or her observations and experiences, but to little avail.

For some reason movie interest was immediate and the book was quickly optioned to Richard Zanuck and David Brown, two wonderful producers for whom I wrote the first script. For unknown reasons, which is the only way I can describe the Hollywood process, they could not put the movie together and the book and script were re-optioned by yet another creative producer James L. Brooks who had read the script first, then the novel and in the end produced the movie.

It is interesting to point out that all of the people who were involved in the purchase of the novel for a movie had contentious divorces, surely a motivating factor in their moving the novel to the screen. The two most obvious principals involved in the movie, this author, and as far as I know, Danny Devito have long time stable marriages.
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Having optioned or sold 12 of my thirty-five books to the movies, including my recent novel Funny Boys, I haven’t a clue to why my novels and short stories attract so much Hollywood interest. I don’t write with the movies in mind, but people tell me there is something compellingly visual in my work, which may or may not be true.

Actually, I was quite happy with the result, which I attribute to the shepherding of this movie through the process by James Brooks and the creative ability of the director Danny Devito. Who can argue with the fact that they helped create an enormously compelling and enduring film, which pretty much followed the story arc of the novel.

As an aside, I was not happy with the adaptation of another book of mine, Random Hearts, which became a movie with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, a view expressed in a New York Times piece I wrote after seeing that film.

But The War of the Roses adaptation to a movie was, to my mind, an excellent rendition. It preserved the ideas and the fidelity of the characters. It successfully translated what I had to say in the book about how greed, materialism and selfishness can whittle away at a character’s integrity, destroy common sense and encourage turbulent emotions that lead to violence. It illustrated the devastating effect such marital conflict could have on children who become innocent victims of the process.

In a later novel The Children of the Roses I carried the story forward to the next generation and showed how this early trauma had impacted on the lives of the Roses’ children. There had been some talk about it becoming a television series, and I do hold out hope that it will one day be up on the silver screen. In that arena one never knows.

It is very hard to predict the life of a book. Some great books die a quick death. Some live on for reasons that baffle logic. In my case I acquired through reversion all the rights to my books and made a big bet on electronic publishing, which is emerging as a winning strategy after years of struggle.

But so far none of my other novels have as yet attained the world wide staying power of The War of the Roses, which continues as a movie to circle the world repeatedly and offer the millions who are aware of the story a sense that the breakup of a marriage has very destructive unintended consequences and should only be considered as last resort.

It is particularly gratifying for a novelist if his or her story has contributed to the betterment of his or her fellow mortals. I think The War of the Roses provides that kind of example.

New books by the author of “The War of the Roses” and “Random Hearts” available for Kindle and Kindle app customers in less than 60 seconds

SEATTLE, Dec. 13, 2010 – Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that bestselling author Warren Adler has made five e-books, none of which have been previously published in any format, available in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). These books, all of which draw from Adler’s skill as a novelist and his keen insight into the nature of intimate human relationships, will also be available in print editions through CreateSpace. All five books in the series – “The David Embrace,” “Flanagan’s Dolls,” “The Womanizer,” “Residue” and “Empty Treasures”—are available for sale today for $7.95 with the e-books exclusive to the Kindle Store for two years.

“Warren Adler has long been involved in digital publishing ventures, and we’re thrilled he’s decided to publish his new series in e-book form exclusively in the Kindle Store,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. “We think Adler fans and readers who are just discovering his work will enjoy this new series.”

Adler is also making available an anthology of “Warren Adler Short Story Contest Winners,” featuring the winning pieces from the Warren Adler Short Story Contest, a contest Adler conceived to promote and revive the medium of the short story as a popular mode of literary expression. The anthology is available for $4.95, and is also exclusive to the Kindle store for two years.

“This exclusive deal reflects the rapidly changing need for mainstream novelists to find innovative ways to market their books,” said Adler. “There is no question that Kindle and Amazon have pointed the way for an author to find new marketing and publicity techniques to gain the attention of its vast reader audience. As a leader in marketing e-books, Kindle offers tremendous opportunities that were never thought possible just a few years ago.”

Adler is a bestselling author of more than 30 books. His books “The War of the Roses” and “Random Hearts” were both made into major motion pictures. Three short stories from his acclaimed collection “The Sunset Gang” have been adapted as a trilogy and shown on Public Television stations. His work has been translated into 25 languages.

Like all Kindle books, these books are Buy Once, Read Everywhere–Kindle customers can purchase these books and read them on the $139 third-generation Kindle device with new high-contrast Pearl e-Ink, on iPads, iPod touches, iPhones, Macs, PCs, BlackBerrys and Android-based devices.  Amazon‘s Whispersync technology syncs your place across devices, so you can pick up where you left off. With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books you purchase from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in your Kindle library on Amazon, where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.

About CreateSpace

CreateSpace is a leader in manufacture on-demand services for independent content creators, publishers, film studios and music labels. CreateSpace provides inventory-free, physical distribution of Books, CDs and DVDs on Demand, music downloads via Amazon MP3 and video downloads via Amazon Video On Demand. CreateSpace is a brand of On-Demand Publishing LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca,  www.amazon.cn, and www.amazon.it.  As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Amazon.com, Inc.
Media Hotline, 206-266-7180

www.amazon.com/pr

It represents another revolutionary marketing concept in what is the rapidly changing publishing world. Although my many novels and short story collections are available on all platforms and all devices, the exclusivity of these five titles further pushes the concept of what I believe will eventually be a major factor in an author’s ability to find readers in a world that will shortly offer an astounding number of books that will soon approach the multi-millions.

The prospects of a fiction writer, to whom writing is a calling and whose obsessive need to write narratives of the imagination is as necessary as oxygen, is an increasingly tough row to hoe as a commercial venture. For genre fiction writers, the possibilities are slightly better but for the mainstream novelist like myself who writes about the human condition and the complexities of relationships in our ever changing and increasingly fragile world, he or she must be open to new and inventive ways to find readers.

To express these views and insights I have tried mightily to cast them in exciting ways, as thrillers, mysteries and stories of love and conflict. All of my works reflect these efforts.

With the big box brick and mortar bookstores faltering as more and more books morph to cyberspace, the challenges for the author are awesome. In my view stories have always been a deep need of we poor human creatures. What happens next, which is at the heart of story telling is the engine of our existence. Who doesn’t want to know what happens next in life?

Having regained my digital publishing rights and digitizing them ten years ago, I have been a pioneer committing my writing future to the idea that the majority of content will eventually morph to the net. It has been an uphill battle.

Until now!

As for the five new titles, they are Empty Treasures, about corruption in Washington, Flanagan’s Dolls, about antiques and murder, The David Embrace, about the power of art to transform, The Womanizer, about adultery and deception and Residue, about how past evils haunt the present.

They have been written in the last few years, but in my opinion, all viable as content for the contemporary reader.

Read the official Amazon Press Release.

Compared to the barbaric violence of the twin towers tragedy, life in New York City was practically a cakewalk during World War II and Goldstein, with journalistic panache describes the events of that time. There were blackouts, rationing, air raid wardens, morale boosting show business events to buttress our patriotism and war bond sales, volunteerism galore with a rousing Stage Door Canteen for servicemen manned by Broadway and movie stars and a surge of patriotism that somehow never attained such levels of enthusiasm in subsequent wars in which our armed forces were involved.

Goldstein cleverly opens his tale of the Big Apple in wartime with an account of how New York played host to the seeding of the event that ended the war with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. He notes that Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, the brilliant scientists who with Albert Einstein, first suggested to President Roosevelt, to implement a program to develop the bomb, were working with the Cyclotron at Columbia University in pioneering research just prior to the war. From out of this suggestion began the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the bomb’s development.

Goldstein reminds us that in the days prior to America entering the war, New York City was a center for home grown Nazis and Hitler supporters. He describes a rally in Madison Square Garden of American Nazis headed by the Jew-baiter Fritz Kuhn in which 20,000 American Nazi’s festooned with swastika arm bands and surrounded with massed authentic Nazi Flags thundered “sieg heil” in glorious tribute to their moustached hero under the watchful eyes of thousands of New York policeman.

During the war, New York City, although it was the principal port through which troops and material reached our allies in Europe, remained remarkably unscathed. Prowling U-boats not far from the mainland were busy torpedoing allied shipping, but in terms of property damage in the city it was not related to the war. By far the biggest property casualty during that time was the fire on the Normandie, the great superliner of France, which toppled in its berth and became a fixture in the city until it was hauled away.

For me, who was a teenager during the war, Goldstein’s book prompted deep feelings of nostalgia. As a Boy Scout in Brooklyn our troop’s Drum and Bugle Corps was present at untold unveilings of plaques in countless neighborhoods expressing collective pride in the fact that their sons and some daughters were serving in the Armed Forces. At the beginning of the war, most of the stars signifying service were blue. Later on as the death toll began to mount many of the stars were changed to gold, signifying killed in action.

We collected tinfoil and newspapers and were enormously disciplined at keeping the blackouts and everyone I know was eagerly fired up with patriotic enthusiasm which Goldstein’s book vividly describes. Remarkably though, life went on as usual and while we all knew there was danger out there somewhere, we did not feel it viscerally for ourselves. Indeed, there was a special kind of reverence for the boys in uniform who appeared with increasing visibility on the streets of the city.

Although it is clear throughout the book that New Yorkers felt deep loyalty and compassion for our troops fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific, Goldstein is careful to keep his narrative upbeat although underlying his text is the clear implication that many New Yorkers had sent their loved ones to the killing fields of Europe and the Pacific and those who returned early were badly wounded and soon many events were filled with young men in wheelchairs and stories of grieving parents.

Those years of patriotic fervor described by Goldstein continues to linger in my psyche to this day. I always shudder with pride and, quite often, produce tears when I remember marching in the Victory Parade down Fifth Avenue as a Boy Scout bugler and can still here the echo of loud cheers by onlookers when they saw our uniformed soldiers march by proudly following in lock step behind the colors.

While “Helluva Town” is a fine historical narrative of New York City in wartime nearly seven decades ago, there is something deeply chilling in the comparison I made earlier with the twin towers debacle. It illustrates profoundly that never again are our cities likely to escape destruction and death from the hands of our enemies. Today we are all on the front lines. There are no blackouts or rationing, no stage door canteens, no rousing patriotic songs and, by my observation, no real visceral awareness of impending danger, and worse, an attempt to render our enemy blurred by definition and an apparent indifference to threats by determined foes.

Goldstein reminds of all of the good old days when we had no doubts about who our enemies were. Best of all, he gives us a thousand reasons why New York is the most wonderful exciting glorious big hearted city on the face of the earth.

Think of it this way. Every time a dedicated reader buys a digitized reading device whether it be a Kindle, SONY reader, Vook, iPad, the upcoming Google device or others crowding into the marketplace, the big box stores and small hard-pressed independents selling hardcover or paperback books lose one customer. That one customer, if he or she is a truly dedicated reader, can be counted on to buy at least one book a month.

Thus, the potential customer for both the big box and independent stores stocking books by traditional publishers can lose ten to twelve sales or more a year. Let us further calculate into the mix that most of these books are one time reads, the industry’s highest profit category.

It is estimated that within the next few years, these reading devices will, by most counts, mount into the multi-millions. There can be no accurate measurement since the number is dependent on numerous factors including the price point, which is bound to be lower and the fact that the content on these dedicated readers are already morphing into mobile smart phones.

Considering the erosion of his customer base, can the retailer locked into the sale of physical books survive using his traditional business paradigm? Does he need the display space to sell his shrinking flow of paper product? Without getting into the esoterics of the retail end of the business with its bizarre contingency methods and pay for placement ploys, he will have to reduce his space as fast as his leases allow and try to save his sales volume by quickly converting his content stream to digital devices. Case in point, the Vook by Barnes and Noble.

His loss of retail customers will be directly proportional to the rise in the number of e-reading devices. Considering the ease of purchase, the endless assortment, the sheer convenience of buying content on these devices, his future will pretty much resemble what befell the music industry. His real hope is that the proliferation of digital reading devices will be slow enough for him to make a sensible retreat and create a new business plan to counter the shrinkage of his paper book customer base.

Unfortunately, when technology creators smell a buck, new innovations swiftly follow and soon products find a price point that fit more and more pocketbooks. Expect the cost of reading devices to dive as more and more people discover that the e-book experience does not impinge upon their comfort with and enjoyment of the content.

What about his principal supplier, the book publisher? The publisher has long held a monopoly over content, advertising, publicity and marketing, along with his partner, the big box bookstore and his on-line partner, chiefly Amazon, which, by far presently holds sway over the physical book business.

With his content, advertising, and marketing monopoly eroding, the publisher has finally awakened to the fact that he is endangered by the slimmer margins he had to swallow by Amazon having set a price point of $9.95 as the price of that content. Fighting back, he has forced Amazon to reprice its book output. There is a growing consensus that this price surge has come too late in the process and will quickly default to Amazon’s $9.95 cap or less.

The publisher, like the retailer, is betting that sales of the digital reader device will move at a pace slow enough to get him to reorganize his resources and cut costs to protect his margins while he noodles ways to continue to show profits to his parent company. If he does not protect his bottom line his number masters will either jump ship or strangle his resources with penny pinching.

The publisher has another problem. He has relied on his skills at branding his authors and impressing them on the public mind. But his branding of new authors will be stymied by the catastrophic shrinkage in the print media and the vast splintering of attention going on in cyberspace. To get traction on the Internet and feature an author above the chatter is a challenge beyond merely flacking him or her on book and social networking sites. Yes, book marketing depends mostly on word of mouth, but it needs a head start somewhere.

One can expect dedicated reading device companies to devise various promotional opportunities for suppliers of digital content, but in a vast marketplace of millions of books multiplied by Google’s ambitious plan to digitize all out of print books and new author generated publishing entries, this will present a challenge that no one has yet come close to mastering.

There is always the possibility of promoting a book on television or direct mail but the margins of single sales may not allow that to equate with a sensible return on dollars spent on these types of promotion, especially for an unbranded author.

One must not discount the creative power of the publisher and the retailer to come up with business saving solutions, but the economic and historical realities will have to be factored in. Which brings us to the author, the producer of the raw material for the publishing trade.

The publishers can still count on their best sellers to lead the pack, although even those who write these books will suffer diminishment in their advances. Like the movie business, the publishers will expect their top sellers to carry the load with the rest of their authors holding up the rear at lower and lower advances, their survival based more upon the necessity to keep alive the concept of a “publisher” who produces many books, which gives his reputation heft and viability. Expect authors who no longer can depend on publishers to provide them with a comfortable living to set out on some alternative publishing path made possible by the ease in which they can enter the fray with the new digital devices.

Of course authors who have not been vetted by the traditional publishing gatekeepers, who keep their eyes peeled for customer trends in every genre, may stumble on their ego generated belief that they can either buck the trends or come up with creative ways to shoehorn their work into traditional genres. Some will succeed. Most won’t. The best shot at alternative publishing will be that author who has been multi-published by the traditional media and can capitalize on his previous books, some name recall and actual participation in the marketplace.

Others may try to emulate the savvy publishers of Romance and Science Fiction genres that now dominate the e-book market, but that strategy will come up against both branded authors of both genres and a glut of product.

Thus, the content monopoly once enjoyed by publishers but no longer as potent, will further diminish their power, along with their marketing monopoly. Still the playing field will not be level for the entrepreneurial author and it will not be easy for him to strike out on his own. He may choose to go with third party digital sellers or hook on exclusively with digital device providers or perhaps join author cooperatives that might or might not achieve results. Deprived of ample advances he will certainly have to pony up his own resources, if he has them.

Indeed, even the branded author with a multi-million book sales experience, might one day take it on his own to sever his relationship with the traditional publisher and set up his business as a marketer of his own books. There are already signs of this alienation beginning.

Rising above the chatter, finding sales traction among millions of books, will be a challenge of enormous proportions for both the publisher and the author, not to mention the impact on backpack manufacturers, bookcase manufacturers, printers, binderies, libraries, artists, and any other trades that have feasted on the publishing business for many years.

One thing is certain, the digital revolution will be game changing for all concerned in the publishing business. It will be deep and profound. Nothing in the business will remain the same. The question will be how long it will take for the e-book
tipping point to arrive.

In my opinion the publishing business might have just enough time left for an orderly retreat. It will make a valiant stand, but in the end it will be forced to surrender to the relentless forces of change.

As rivalries escalate and alliances form only to be broken, this powerful novel of family pride, personal ambition, and individual ethics moves to its compelling and ingenious climax.

Read the first chapter of Blood Ties free now!

My motives were twofold. I did not want to suffer the fate of so many of my fellow authors whose books were declared out of print by publishers while existing copies were moldering on shelves in private homes and in libraries where they would be eventually discarded. Another obvious motive was an attempt to keep my authorial name in the public eye for the foreseeable future.

There is, of course, a great deal of ego involved in such an investment of time and money, but as every author knows, the writing of a book whether it be a work of the imagination, opinion or scholarship, is essentially a product of an inner voice that is determined to be heard.

Before the age of digitization there were few options for authors to preserve their work for future generations. Now that digitization makes such preservation possible, there is no reason for any author to accept the extinction of his or her work through unavailability.

Of course, keeping these works alive and available does not mean that anyone will ever read them in the future. Even the most popular writers of yesterday disappear from public view at astonishing speeds, a fate that is sure to be shared by most contemporary best sellers. Digitization will not guarantee readership and many digital books may simply float aimlessly through cyberspace until the end of time, a lonely exile into infinity.

While that long time bet remains in force, digitizing my books involved a shorter term bet as well. I felt certain that, despite all the numerous failures and the dashing of high hopes which ravaged the e-book dream, that reader friendly devices, would one day emerge from the brains and skills of our electronic engineers and eventually reward both readers and entrepreneurs.

I knew in my gut that this would happen and it has. The issue has always been convenience, portability and reading clarity. That issue has been resolved and will now be improved upon exponentially. The first generation Kindle, the Sony Reader and variations of smart phone technology will in a few short years surpass the paper book as a method to distribute content.

I have been making that statement for more than a dozen years. I have been excoriated, pummeled, insulted and cajoled for making such a statement in various public forums. Time and again, people have extolled the technology of the paper book as the only acceptable format for conveying content.

People would declaim:“I love my paper book, the tactile feel of the it, the smell of it, the look of it. I will never abandon my love for the paper book. For me it will be the only way to enjoy stories and absorb information.”

It was difficult to deflect such a view since I, too, love the paper book. My passion is books. Reading them, writing them, savoring them not only for their content but for the beauty of their appearance, the feel of them. For me they represent one of the joyful wonders of life. Admittedly, there were moments of doubt, not doubt about the ultimate clarity and portability of content, but whether or not the human mind would accept the transference and absorption of digital content in a way that would provide people with a satisfactory experience that could rival what one achieved through the paper book.

Even with those devices currently on the market, particularly the Kindle, all of my doubts have been put aside. In fact, I can say with absolute conviction that reading books on this new device has increased the pleasure and absorption of content that not only rivals but in some cases surpasses the experience of reading a paper book. It has even made the act of purchasing the book more convenient and user friendly. I can make my choice, sample it first with excerpts, then buy it at a huge discount from what I would normally pay for a paper book and download it to my device in a matter of seconds.

There are still some obstacles to book selection which may never be overcome, although there are attempts to inform and review the various books that are offered by the companies that dispense them. Unfortunately wading through the hype and the lack of credibility and bias among the reviewers is an enormous problem and my instinct is to ignore them and make my selection based on the downloaded samples and excerpts.

Frankly, although she is widely respected, I do not take my reading cues from Oprah and I have long eschewed reviews from the media and the roar of the publishing company flacks and their profusion of buddy blurbs.

I have no doubt that the day is coming when these portable devices will dominate the educational system. Backpacks will disappear. Libraries will morph into other uses connected with books. Brick and mortar stores will change their focus. Newspapers as we know them today will fade into other forms. Digitization will take over as the method of conveying all forms of information in every profession. It is easy to be carried away by such prognostications.

Unfortunately not all of this orgy of digitization will be good. A new addiction will begin to inflict us, if it hasn’t already, information glut. Too many incoming information missiles assaulting us. But that is a matter for another discussion.

There is nothing, nothing, more wondrous, more powerful in their capacity to teach, persuade, inform and amplify the imagination than words. Stories form the very basis of our civilization. The imagery they insert into the human imagination is the power that fuels the engine of humanity. How these words are delivered may not be as important as the information they impart, but I am happy to report that the e-book method of delivery has surpassed my wildest dreams.